● Double the headcount of AI technology-related employees to 200 to build resilient foundation that sustainably supports service growth

TOKYO – March 2, 2020 – LINE Corporation ("LINE") announces that it will restructure its AI-related organization on March 1 and boost recruitment efforts to increase its AI-related employee headcount to 200 by the end of 2021 to promote research and development of AI technology as well as the growth of LINE's AI technology-based businesses.

In 2016, LINE established LINE Data Labs—a dedicated development department that analyzes and researches data for LINE and related services. This bold decision tore down LINE's business silos and has enabled holistic use of LINE users' behavioral and other data for more accurate data analysis and efficient data use through information filtering since. The LINE Data Labs' work is supporting a wide range of products and services including content displayed in Smart Channel (the banner at the top of the LINE Chats tab), development of the recommendation engine used for LINE Stickers, LINE Manga, and LINE News, and user behavior analysis for LINE's services.

Then in 2017, LINE unveiled the Clova AI assistant that powers LINE's AI speakers including Clova Friends and Clova Desk, LINE Carnavi that enables voice command while driving, and other products. In June 2019, LINE's proprietary AI technology was opened up to external partners through a new business called LINE BRAIN. LINE BRAIN uses AI technology to streamline work and improve user convenience to resolve a variety of dilemmas that many industries share, including answering FAQs, manually issuing bills, and taking phone inquiries at restaurants and customer support centers.

In addition to reinforcing ties with external partners, LINE continues to develop and improve its AI including voice recognition that understands human speech, natural language processing that understands speech content, and optical character recognition that recognizes text under different conditions.

LINE boosts AI capabilities with more people and team work to expedite commercialization of AI technology and improve service value using big data

To promote research and development of AI technology as well as the growth of LINE's AI technology-based businesses, LINE is restructuring its AI-related organization and will be doubling its AI-related employee headcount to 200 by the end of 2021. As of March 1, teams in charge of data platform development, data analysis, machine learning, AI technology development, and fundamental research will be consolidated into a single organization to reinforce team work and shorten the time from research and development to production. The restructuring will enable LINE to expedite commercialization of its AI-based services through LINE BRAIN, currently undergoing POC with selected partners. Furthermore, by restructuring the organization to promote data use across businesses and departments, LINE can utilize its massive database to its fullest extent and improve the usability of its existing services as well as create new AI-powered services and functionalities. Finally, LINE will hire more machine learning engineers, data scientists, researchers, data platform engineers, and other AI-related technology experts to build a development foundation that sustainably supports the growth of LINE's AI-related services.